Improbable, Epic Games Establish $25 Million Fund To Help Devs Move To 'More Open Engines' After Unity Debacle

Lucas Matney writes via TechCrunch: Improbable is taking a daring step after announcing earlier today that Unity had revoked its license to operate on the popular game development engine. The U.K.-based cloud gaming startup has inked a late-night press release with Unity rival Epic Games, which operates the Unreal Engine and is the creator of Fortnite, establishing a $25 million fund designed to help game developers move to 'more open engines.' This is pretty bold on Improbable's part and seems to suggest that Unity didn't give them a call after Improbable published a blog post that signed off with, 'You [Unity] are an incredibly important company and one bad day doesn't take away from all you've given us. Let's fix this for our community, you know our number.'

Unity, for its part, claims that they gave Improbable ample notice that they were in violation of their Terms of Service and that the two had been deep in a 'partnership' agreement that obviously fell short. The termination of Improbable's Unity license essentially cut them off from a huge portion of indie developers who build their stuff on Unity. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was quick to jump on the news earlier today, rebuking Unity's actions. 'Epic Games' partnership with Improbable, and the integration of Improbable's cloud-based development platform SpatialOS, is based on shared values, and a shared belief in how companies should work together to support mutual customers in a straightforward, no-surprises way,' the blog post reads.